NLL 11 (X360)

The National Lacrosse League's new Xbox 360 game
Release Date: Apr 15, 2011

NLL 11 is scheduled to hit the Xbox LIVE Indie Marketplace later this spring. For those not familiar with the sport, indoor lacrosse is hard-hitting, high-scoring, and very fast-paced. It combines the best parts of hockey, basketball, and soccer all into one. If you're a sports fan and have never seen a National Lacrosse League game, you're missing out big time. Not to worry! The league broadcasts all of their games 

Developed by Crosse Studio in conjunction with Stir Fry Games, NLL 11 improves upon last year's release with a completely revamped game engine, better graphics, and new gameplay features such as fighting (check out the video to the left) and line changes.

The game features all ten NLL teams and the league's 230 players, a completely new game engine, franchise mode, player statistics, celebrations and much more. For the first time, NLL11 also includes fighting in the video game. For the second straight year, the cost of the game is $5.

The first version of the game, NLL Lacrosse 2010, was named the "Best Indie Sports Game" of 2010 by Kotaku.com, a leading website in the video gaming community. NLL Lacrosse 2010 was among games such as MLB 2K10, NBA 2K11, NCAA Football 11 & EA Sports MMA as winners of the Sports Video Games of the Year.

"Line changes will be done manually this year," said Carlo Sunseri, founder of Crosse Studio. "You can also edit who is on each line. On top of that, there is fatigue which actually makes lines changes necessary to your success in the game."

Line changes were one of the more frustrating aspects of last year's game as players seemed to come and go almost at random. This change is definitely a step forward in the NLL video games becoming respected a yearly franchise. It should be noted that no sports franchise became an industry juggernaut overnight. It took years of fine-tuning and refinements.

NLL Lacrosse 2010 was the first indoor lacrosse video game since Blast Lacrosse was released on the PlayStation in 2001 and won Kotaku's "Best Indie Sports Game" award last year. With a multitude of new improvements and features, NLL 11 should build on this success.